The
speech rhythm also reminds us of the Middle Age four-beat line, but here the lines are shorter--with only 1-3 stresses.
Lena Zipp and Adina Staicov's "English in San Francisco Chinatown: Indexing Identity with
Speech Rhythm?" (205-227) offers new insights into the negotiation of ethnic identity through speech features, by analysing data collected from ethnicity questionnaires and interviews with second-generation Chinese American living in the San Francisco Chinatown community.
Speech rhythm in varieties of English: Evidence from educated Indian English and British English.
Babies in the music group had stronger brain responses to the disruption in both music and
speech rhythm, they found.
Scholars from Europe, Africa, and Malaysia describe the acquisition of English vowels and consonants and their distribution in syllables and the acquisition of English prosody, discussing rhoticity in Brunei English and Malaysian English, the acquisition of voice onset time, the vowel perception of Polish children who moved to Ireland, the realization of English loanwords in Bangla (Bengali), the production of onset clusters by Nigerian speakers of English, the acquisition of
speech rhythm in German and Mandarin Chinese speakers of English, the perception and production of stress placement in English, and prosodic strategies of marking focus and givenness in South African English.
Finally, given the hierarchical nature of
speech rhythm, some other rhythm might prove more relevant to the turn cycle than syllable rhythm.
The chapter's conclusion launches with disarming lucidity: "I have claimed that certain aspects of
speech rhythm and musical rhythm show a striking similarity, such as the grouping of events into phrases, whereas other aspects are fundamentally different, such as the role of temporal periodicity" (pp.
She begins by noting that Brecht inherited the concept of movement rooted in music from Dalcrozian eurhythmics, via Meyerhold's biomechanics, and argues that there is even a parallel between Wagner's view that gesture was "the generative kernel from which both melody and
speech rhythm should grow" and Brecht's concept."If Brecht's initial conception of Gestus was one of corporeality in the form of the showing body, his reconsideration of that concept in the mid-1930s entailed a shift emphasizing the sounding body" (54).
Speech rhythm is readjusted on phrase level--the more moras in the phrase, the shorter their average durations.
He argues, for example, that theater students should use "every punctuation mark as a signifier of
speech rhythm" since Jonson's characters are defined by their distinctive "vocal mannerisms" (100).
The features of spoken Estonian, such as
speech rhythm and segmental duration and their role in mother tongue instruction are discussed.